Mobilising Teacher Education in Ireland: The MiTE Ecosystem for Learning by Design

This chapter outlines an innovative and emergent multilevel initiative in the School of Education, National University of Ireland, Galway, focused on infrastructuring educational transformation in teacher education through the use of mobile learning technologies. We illustrate how the initiative has grown from an innovative programme locally, into a significant, foundational contribution to both a well-established international conference and emerging international network of mobile teacher educators. The initiative, which now encompasses the first international conference in the field (MiTE: Mobile Technology in Teacher Education), originated and was developed through the Máistir Gairmiúil san Oideachas (which translates in English as Professional Master of Education), a national flagship postgraduate degree that prepares teachers to teach a wide range of curriculum subjects (e.g. humanities, sciences, mathematics, etc.) through the medium of the Irish language in Irish second-level schools. We use MiTE in this chapter to describe the innovative ecosystem as a whole, encompassing the internal infrastucturing of the local mobile teacher education programme, and external infrastucturing through the MiTE Conference, EU DEIMP Project and IMoLeNTE International Network of mobile teacher educators. The chapter illustrates how multi-level infrastructuring (Penuel, 2019) underpinned and informed by key theoretical frameworks (e.g. iPAC) can be crucial and helpful to us as educational technology designers and innovators; not only to initiate impactful change, but critically to promote and sustain innovation with mobile technology in teacher education.